From ‘go slow’ to no motion

While Nigerians await the reports and submissions of the nearly two-score committees and super-committees to which President Goodluck Jonathan outsourced his presidency, it is as if the nation must endure a long spell of regression both in governance and the quality of life of citizens before things begin to take shape – that is if they will. Unfortunately, with barely two months left in the first trimester of a Presidency that aspires to be transformational, not even those enamoured of the saying that things may need to get worse before they get better can beat their chests that the nation is headed in the right direction.

The regression starts with the President who sets no clear goals in sight, but insists that we judge him by some nebulous, indefinable parameters of performance – a straight lesson from OBJ manual on Managing Without Goals! How about the Jonathan tag team that is nearly as clueless as the next Nigerian in a season that is said to be an emergency?

Back to OBJ. Asked to assess his administration’s progress in the power sector, I recall the ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo once sharing a rather turgid joke shortly after his administration recorded what became its serial short-lived feats of interrupted darkness; an aide had reportedly complained of his refrigerator working overtime after which the then President dutifully lectured that the problem was not with the refrigerator but the breathless thermostat then receiving an overdose of OBJ’s incremental power!

With a record spend in excess of $16 billion on power and still counting, the nation today knows better.

President Jonathan has since added another OBJ virtue of making light jokes of serious national issues. Pressed to put a timeline to when the administration’s initiatives in the power sector would start bearing fruit, he says, “soon”. Of course he added that power-starved Nigerians would have no choice but throw away their I-pass-my-neighbour contraptions that are now sources of endless noise and environmental pollution when Jonathan power arrive town. The nation is by now familiar with the unknown equation of “very soon” – the standard alibi which successive do-nothing administrations have clung to excuse incompetence, dishonesty and plain cluelessness. This is what President Jonathan has opted to trade with.

What is perhaps new is that the highly recommended and inarguably credentialed Barth Nnaji – on whose shoulders lie the so-called Jonathan power reform – appears to have succumbed to the debilitating disease of policy and operational inexactitude. We are supposed to be moving into a new era of transparency and light, aren’t we? The reality unfortunately is that the dark curtains darkness is not only rolling back steadily, the nation has also been sentenced into darkness as far as understanding what is going on in the power sector goes.

What is the state of the super-transmission contract awarded by the Jonathan administration? Is the contract on course? What about the gas projects expected to deliver power to the National Integrated Power Projects (NIPP)? How far have these projects gone and what needs to be done to bring them up to speed? It does not make sense that a scientific mind like the cerebral professor cannot put his hand on the handle to tell Nigerians how long it will take them to get out of the power conundrum. Today, all manner of alibis ranging from the stupid to the ludicrous are being thrown up to rationalise the ring of darkness that has since been thrown around the nation, particularly in recent weeks.

This is where the President’s reported vow to replicate the Asian Tiger miracles in Nigeria in far away South Korea is laughable. First, I do not know how much time the President has on his hands to deliver his miracle. Second, Nigerians cannot see anything different that this administration has done to lend to any optimism that results will be different. But even more fundamentally is that this administration is a slow learner.

The President was right on one point though: the Asian tigers lacked one thing that Nigeria has a surfeit of: natural resources. But he forgot to add that the Asian miracle was really no miracle – it was a product of planning, discipline and hard work plus visionary leadership. It was the admixture of these elements which delivered the outlandish growths in the 1960s through the ‘90s to lift the economies of South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong into first world economies.

We have dwelt long enough on the so-called seven percent growth that is neither transformative in terms of diversifying the bases of the economy nor inclusive in terms of lifting more people out of poverty. Where are the policies and programmes in science, engineering education and infrastructure on which anyone can hope to erect a dream of accelerated development? Where are they?

With crude oil still flowing without let, and with crude prices in steady high, the decade has been one of failed promises. Indeed, while the prodigious spending proclivities of successive spendthrift administrations have been guaranteed, the guarantee on the Main Street has been deepening poverty and misery from the failure to convert the gains of record earnings to improve the infrastructure situation.

Don’t ask me if things have improved under President Jonathan. I leave that to the judgment of the individual. But then, some facts are undeniable. The first is that this administration has spent more than it has received; this fact underlies the current fears of an imminent return to that ruinous path of debt peonage. Secondly, the gap between resources deployed to deliver the so-called public good and the actual value delivered has grown, not diminished under this President; this again, is most noticeable in the rising cost of governance. To these we can add the absence of a body of philosophy driving governance. No wonder the dearth of quality policies by a team said to have been drawn from among the best of Nigerians. It explains why the nation is stuck.